


What They Grow Beyond

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: The Edge Between the Sand and the Stars [2]
Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (not that kind of Skywalker), Clone Wars as History, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Shmi Skywalker, Force Ghosts, Force Visions, Force-Sensitive Shmi Skywalker, Ilum, Lightsabers, Multi, Original Trilogy as History, Other, Prequel Trilogy As History, Rey Skywalker, Tatooine, Teaching, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 06:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15407046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: The war is spluttering to a halt, and Rey goes to Tatooine to build a lightsaber.





	What They Grow Beyond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celeste9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/gifts).



> Written for Celeste, with thanks to brynnmclean for the beta!
> 
> Follows on from my story _The Edge Between the Sand and the Stars_ , but should be fairly easy to follow without that knowledge.

“Try not to get into too much trouble out there,” Luke said, watching Rey pack her speeder.

 

“I survived Jakku,” Rey said, in a voice that was probably supposed to be reassuring.

 

“Well, Jakku is Jakku,” Luke said. “Tatooine is –”

 

“Different?” Rey supplied, when Luke didn’t finish that sentence immediately. Luke felt his mouth twitch slightly, edging towards a smile. As the war wore on and Rey grew from a wary scavenger to a confident young Jedi, she grew brisker and quicker, less prone to silently fading into the background and more ready to assert herself.

  
She reminded him a lot of Leia, some days. Everyone Luke had ever spoken to said Leia’s gestures were the image of her mother, her speech the echo of her father’s, and Luke had seen enough holos to believe them, but Luke wondered if some of that sharpness owed more to a long-dead Skywalker than Bail and Breha Organa.

 

“Yes,” Luke said, even though he wasn’t sure how it was true. Jakku was, logically speaking, as treacherous as Tatooine; he knew that, he’d been there, long before Rey had even been born. There were whirlpools of death there, for a Force-sensitive. Trails of darkness in the bodies of the ships that Rey had picked over. That kind of stain didn’t fade in a couple of decades.

 

But neither did the impact of centuries of slavery and war with the Tuskens, let alone the Hutts’ pernicious influence. And there was still a part of Luke that remembered Aunt Beru’s stories, the ones carefully handed down from the blood-link he shared with Rey, the ones that cut too close to the bone and kept Luke following certain little rituals and superstitions, thirty-five years and more since he’d left home.

 

Rey was waiting, and so was Luke’s extremely packed diplomatic schedule. He cursed Leia for delegating all dealings with the Tatooine Free System and Hutt Space to him, relevant cultural background or no relevant cultural background. If he weren’t stuck in a bunch of meetings with the Law Speaker and various planetary representatives, or if he didn’t have a number of informal little chats planned in which he’d been instructed to make careful reference to the sharp eyes and even sharper memory of Jabba the Hutt’s merciless killer, he could have gone with her.

 

“It’ll be fine,” Rey said, humouring him. Luke made a face at her. “I’ll be careful. I have all the maps and instructions you gave me, and my old lightsaber, and Finn’s spare blaster. And the Darklighters aren’t _that_ far away. And I can reach you easily from the Jundland Plateau. And even if the blaster breaks and my lightsaber dies and I crash the speeder and I can’t reach the Darklighters and you aren’t listening when I call… I still have the Force.”

 

She wiggled her fingers and made the door-curtain of light wooden beads behind Luke crackle in the artificial breeze.

 

Luke rolled his eyes. “You’re a very disrespectful apprentice.”

 

“It probably runs in the family,” Rey said.

 

“Bugger off and find your new lightsaber crystal,” Luke said, folding his arms.

 

Rey’s snicker, and her razor-flash grin, reminded him not of Leia but himself, twenty-one and burning bright.  Luke squeezed his arms tight and stared after her, into the horizon.

 

***

 

The Jundland Plateau wasn’t anything like the desert Rey had grown up in. Tall, winding canyons of reddish rock cutting through a flat-topped slab of land that spread for a hundred miles in any direction, hiding any number of long-forgotten fugitives and Tusken clans and their bones, bore no resemblance to the rolling dunes and treacherous quicksands of Niima Outpost.

 

Still, it felt familiar, and not purely because she’d visited before. Part of it was certainly that Rey now _knew_ herself to be a Skywalker, to have had a grandmother and great-aunts and cousins who lived and breathed this air, but part of it was a deeper ring in the Force. A welcome or a warning or a challenge: Rey had no idea. She tried not to think about it when she was supposed to be flying the speeder.

 

She stopped for a break at the old Lars farmstead, when the Wastes were still a reddish blur on the horizon, and poured water into the sand at the graves by the entrance. She’d never been enormously religious, not the way some people in the Resistance were – _the Force doesn’t need my worship,_ Leia always said, _it exists_ , and Rey nodded and understood somewhere in her bones - but she sat for a while and meditated, listening to Skywalkers echo down the decades.

 

Then she got up and carried on.

 

Obi-Wan Kenobi had chosen his hideout well, considering he had arrived on Tatooine an outlander. It wasn’t difficult for Rey to find a shaded, hidden space to park her speeder and make herself at home in his ascetic hermit’s home. She cleared it out, scared a nest of lizards out of an inbuilt cupboard and killed a lethal spider before it could try to kill her, then set up her own things in the bare space. The vaporator still worked, better than Rey had expected and certainly good enough for her purposes, but she floated her cans of water up to the house anyway, and set up the portable holonet hookup in lieu of trying to resurrect the badly damaged one in the house, which had been all but ripped out by an unartistic hand. Rey felt a certain professional disapproval. The scavenger would have halved the possible take by fouling up the extraction like that. Maybe they’d been scared of a possible vengeful ghost. There’d been plenty of those around the Death Fields Rey had spent fifteen years scavenging in, and the more Rey learned of the Force and death, the more credence she lent to those rumours.

 

She meditated over the sunset with a blaster by her side, just in case, and then shut herself carefully into the hut and locked all the shutters and bolts she had cleaned and oiled earlier. She recorded a message for Finn and Poe, sent Luke a brief note to say she had arrived and was fine – she could hear him worrying all the way from Mos Espa, but hadn’t allowed her mind to range out that far for fear of reacting too slowly if something did come along – and then went to sleep.

 

Rey often dreamed. Sometimes her dreams meant things, although she didn’t often see specifics; lately she dreamed a lot of deserts, which was one reason why she’d come here, to Tatooine, rather than giving in to the temptation to try out a little Jedi tradition and visiting the long-abandoned crystal labyrinth of Ilum. Ilum, frozen and ancient, she didn’t know. Tatooine called to her in a way that tugged on her bones.

 

 _I’m here_ , Rey thought, sliding under the surface of sleep. _Let’s see what you’ve got for me._

 

There was no narrative to the dream. Rey wandered through the old city of Mos Espa, the part that bled into the slave quarters, but not as she had known them; they had been half-destroyed in the Huttslayers’ Rebellion, and while she recognised individual buildings, others had a form older and less solidly built than the one she knew today. There were people of all ages, genders and species, but Rey recognised none of them, and none of them met her eye; she passed homes and tiny shops and heard conversations, _Jabba’s going to challenge Gardulla and we’ll get caught up in it_ , _nobody’s betting on the Boonta Eve like they should, everyone knows Sebulba will win_ , and once, a boy’s voice, high and curious and sincere: _are you an angel_?

 

Rey turned to follow the boy, got as far as a glimpse of golden hair and a young teenager with brown eyes smiling, and then took a step and was out in the desert and the darkness with screams coming from throats that weren’t human and flaming torches flashing in the night. Rey drew her lightsaber to defend herself, dropping automatically into the first stance of Soresu, and the first creature to really see her in the dream came to a dead halt, wailed in terror, and fled. Rey extinguished her lightsaber and drew a less telling vibroblade, closing her eyes so they would get accustomed to the darkness, and then –

 

 _The problem with the galaxy is that no-one helps each other_ , and Rey was standing outside the hut she was sleeping in, shutters open, daylight, a voice she’d never heard in life.

 

_This was your father’s. He wanted you to have it._

 

Rey looked down at her hands, and her lightsaber was there, but it felt insubstantial, faded. When she grasped at it it turned to smoke.

 

“Huh,” Rey said out loud, and took a step forward to knock on the hut’s wall and announce herself, but the step forward pitched her over the edge of a cliff that wasn’t there, down into the darkness of a canyon, bouncing off every bloody wall on the way, and she rolled to a stop long enough to stagger to her feet and find herself staring at a young man tucked into an alcove, hooded and dressed in black, swearing at the sparking mechanical parts in his hands, the green-tinged crystal: and then she swayed sideways, sat down, fell further and further, until she opened her eyes and found that she had in fact rolled off the bed onto the floor and that the lightsaber she had carried throughout the war without incident was on the other side of the room from where she’d left it, within easy reach of her bed.

 

“Ugh,” Rey said, touching tender hands to her head to check she hadn’t hit anything important on the way down. “Fine. I can take a hint.”

 

She got up, ate breakfast, watched the recorded message Finn had sneaked her in a dull moment between interplanetary negotiations to bring another system into the fold of the Resistance – or the New New Republic, or the Third Republic, or the Democratic Consortium, or the Restored Republic, or the Confederation of Democratic Systems, or whatever they were calling it today – and glanced over the holonews. She didn’t feature, which was a relief, but Poe did. Apparently he’d broken a blockade: there was a photo of him looking handsome, lifting a small boy onto his hip and cradling the child’s skull in one gentle hand. The boy was clinging to Poe almost as hard as he was to the fistful of child-optimised ration bars Poe had clearly offered him.

 

Rey smiled, small and warm, and smiled more broadly when the article made a note that the first Resistance-affiliated civilian organisation with boots on the ground had been the Youngling Support Organisation. One day there’d be no more children like her left behind by parents who couldn’t keep them, no more orphans of circumstance.

 

Or at least, said the part of Rey that had fought her way through one war and was now gearing up to keep the peace so victory would last, there’d be a lot fewer.

 

She realised with a start that she was eating into the cool hours of the day when she could search for crystals, and hurriedly got up, pulled on her boots and gear, and strode confidently into the Jundland Plateau, Force-senses ranging wide.

 

She returned, sweaty and annoyed, as the sun sank towards the horizon, having found absolutely nothing. A quick blast in the fresher rid her of most of the sweat but not her bad temper; she ate a proper meal and spent an hour on moving meditations taught to her by a Rodian who had just been passing through and found herself calmer.

 

 _A crystal will come to you at the right moment_ , General Organa had said, before Rey left. _Which is sometimes the absolute worst moment you can think of._

 

Luke had found his while hiding from Tuskens, when the slightest noise or movement would have given him away to them. General Organa had found hers in the middle of tense diplomatic negotiations on the planet Ilum. Rey didn’t know where Jas or Minna or any of the other Force-sensitives she knew well had found their crystals, or under what circumstances it had happened: Jas, solemn as usual, had fidgeted with the edge of their shirt and volunteered that it was something you had to do yourself, by yourself, in your own way. Then they’d gone back to lecturing Orlà, a mischievous mostly-Twi’lek padawan off Saleucami, for teaching Mando’a swearwords to the planetary governor’s children, so Rey hadn’t had the opportunity to ask them what they really meant.

 

She’d tried reading about it, working slowly through old texts on Ilum, listening to spoken history testimonies of the temples on Jedha and their kyber reserves. She’d written down every detail Luke could give her, and asked for more on the way to Tatooine, but since most of what he’d had to say was “I just looked up and it was there, catching the light,” it hadn’t helped. He’d drawn her a map of the crystal beds and shown her his memories, and Rey had done exactly what she was supposed to.

  
She’d seen many crystals today. But none of them were _her_ crystal.

 

She dreamed again, even less coherently. _This lightsaber is your life_ , and she was drawing a blue blade in an access corridor of some kind, facing down a heavily tattooed zabrak. _This lightsaber is your life_ , and she was raising a purple blade against the shadows. _This lightsaber is your life_ , falling down a cliff into deep water with a saber still tightly clutched in one hand; _this lightsaber is your life_ , screaming as lightning overcame her and her saber fell from nerveless fingers. _This lightsaber is your life_ (extinguishing a green blade and throwing it aside) _this lightsaber is your life_ (lifting twin white sabers in a gloomy temple) _this lightsaber is your life_ (a red crossbarred lightsaber slashing through plascrete panels in her hand) _this lightsaber is your life_ –

 

Rey woke up because General Organa, who worked at peculiar hours of the day and sent messages whenever she pleased, had sent her a recently digitised copy of a treatise on lightsaber construction, and the ping of her datapad knocked her out of her dream. It wasn’t even dawn, but she was grateful. She had sweated through her pyjamas and the blanket was wrapped around her ankles like shackles.

 

She couldn’t get back to sleep again. She wiped the sweat away with a damp cloth, meditated until dawn, and then tied her hair up and went out searching again.

 

She found a nest of baby krayt dragons breaking glossy-eyed from their shells, and had to make a hasty retreat before she met their parent, but she certainly didn’t find any crystals. She staggered back to the hut, washed and ate and fell into bed as exhausted as she ever had been when she worked for Unkar Plutt, but could not sleep.

 

“This is a joke,” she said aloud, in the stillest hours of the night, tense and dry-eyed and on edge with waiting. “This is… this is ridiculous.”

 

She reached for her datapad and found that no-one she would like to talk to was online; she considered prodding Luke with the Force, but then decided it could wait for the morning. If she carried on like this, she wouldn’t be fit to go crystal-hunting in the morning.

 

She got up and drank some water; opened one of the shutters and stared out into the night. The eerie silence transformed, after a few moments of listening, into the soft creaking of insects and the shuffle of lizards’ movement: Rey bathed in the peace of it for a little while, but eventually closed the shutters, reluctantly forced to admit that she didn’t feel any sleepier for the cool night air and stillness.

 

She ran through some stretches, did a few lightsaber katanas with the lightsaber turned off – Obi-Wan Kenobi’s hut was not that large – and considered whether Kenobi himself would answer, if she asked for help. She chewed her lip, and tried to escape the idea that this was the right place, but he was the wrong person, even though she knew barely anything about him: only the stories Luke had passed on, and the memory of the first time Luke had brought her to the hut, when she had panicked and recoiled in terror from the echoes of Kenobi’s long years of loneliness and endurance. They had too much in common for Rey to be ready to talk to him yet.

 

In all honesty, Rey had actually spoken to only one Force Ghost in her life. She sensed a few, and thought she had encountered others – she had certainly not been alone when she fought Snoke – but she had only ever conversed with one, and had only been certain of that ghost’s identity for a year or so. Shmi Skywalker had walked beside her all the days of her life, and had held out a stabilising hand when she’d needed one, rather than when she’d wanted one. Rey, her eye-sockets aching with tiredness and a migraine creeping into her meninges, wondered if this counted as wanting or needing.

 

She laid down on her bed and closed her eyes, hoping for sleep, and hoping for dreams, not nightmares.

 

She opened them again in her dream, and found herself looking at the Lars homestead. It was empty, but not empty as it was in the present day: empty as it had been thirty-five years ago, before Luke Skywalker had been a local hero, but after it had been burned out. Rey could probably guess at a precise date if she tried, or if she asked Luke. Three of the familiar headstones were there, and the front door was hammered shut with strips of iron.

 

The desert woman who had taught Rey in her dreams since Rey was a child was standing on the low undulating sand with her back to the homestead, looking out into the light of the twin setting suns.

 

“My blood,” Rey said to Shmi Skywalker. “This feels too easy.”  


“My loved one,” Shmi answered without turning around, “that’s because you like making things difficult for yourself.”  
  
“I don’t like them like that,” Rey grumbled, trudging over to join her. “They just are that way.”

 

Shmi smiled. Rey came to a halt next to her, and propped her hands on her hips, squinting into the violet-striped orange of the sunset.

 

“You know how to ask for help, my loved one,” Shmi said, with gentle reproof. “I’m not sure why you didn’t this time.”  
  
Rey scowled at her, and listed all the ways in which she had asked for help, which only made Shmi smile. She smiled like Luke and General Organa did sometimes, Rey noticed: softly at first, all the way to her eyes, without opening her mouth.

 

“Let the Force guide you,” Shmi said. “If you ask, it will.”

 

“I thought I did ask,” Rey said. Her hair was loose, the way she’d left it to sleep, and she ran her fingers through it and yanked hard on a handful in irritation.

 

Shmi raised her eyebrows. “Try again.”

 

“Yes, my blood,” Rey sighed, resigned.

 

She sat down on the dune, and Shmi sat down beside her; Shmi rested an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close, the way she had when Rey was young, nine, ten, fiercely independent, bitingly afraid. Rey leaned into her warmth and let her eyes unfocus.

 

“What if I’m in the wrong place?” she said.

 

“Ask yourself that,” Shmi said. “Not me.”

 

Rey sighed. “Do you know anything about lightsabers?”

 

Shmi laughed. “No.”

 

Rey heaved another, larger sigh.

 

Shmi stroked her hair off her face gently. “The past is what you make of it, remember.”

 

Something about those words struck a chord, deep in Rey, something that couldn’t be explained by the many ways that maxim applied to her specifically that she already knew about. She stiffened, and Shmi cupped the side of her head with one loving hand and rested her skull against Rey’s. The outline of the sunset was growing blurry, even though Rey blinked her eyes into focus.

 

“The past is what you make of it,” Rey repeated.

 

“My loved one,” Shmi said, and Rey woke up.

 

It was well past dawn, and she felt her lack of sleep in her bones, but she no longer had the headache she’d fallen asleep with. She got up and packed her things for a day’s crystal hunting, and was surprised to find her hand hovering uncertainly over the lightsaber she had inherited from Luke and Anakin Skywalker by way of Maz Kanata, the one she had carried throughout the war.

 

Rey’s other hand went to her hip, where her usual holster was waiting for the saber. Her fingers settled on the weapon’s metal, but something didn’t feel quite right. Eventually she put the lightsaber in her knapsack instead of on her hip, and left feeling like she’d made an unsatisfactory compromise, but at least it was _a_ compromise.

 

She took the speeder to the place that was thickest with crystals, even though she knew it wasn’t quite right, either – but it was the epicentre of the crystal-bearing formation, and she could walk wherever she needed to from here, and nothing else felt better.

  
Feeling profoundly silly, Rey climbed off the speeder, sat down in the shade of an alcove with her knapsack at her left and a blaster at her right, and closed her eyes to ask the Force for help.

 

It felt like it took hours. The suns shifted and moved over Rey’s alcove, and her skin burned and sweat ran down her neck, but it all felt curiously separate from her, drifting in the Force, feeling it lick around her like campfire flames, friendly-painful.

 

At last the heat drained away, and Rey opened her eyes to find that the canyon she sat in was growing shadowed, and that an unfamiliar man was squatting on his heels before her. He had the distinctive blue tinge of a Force ghost, but was dressed in clothes that would have been dark if their colour had been clearer: the kind of Jedi robes that appeared on old holos from the Clone Wars, with about half the usual layers and minimal armour on top, the old Order’s insignia on a pauldron. He was human, with wavy, rather lank hair, a narrow jaw, and narrow, humorous eyes.

 

“Hi,” he said.

 

“Hello,” Rey croaked back, rather stuck for a proper response, and very conscious that every uncovered bit of skin was sunburned worse than she’d ever burned anything. If she found a crystal because of this she was never, ever going to let it go.

 

“Go for the bacta before we try introductions,” said the ghost helpfully. “I can wait.”

 

Rey pulled bacta and water from her knapsack, and smeared the bacta over her exposed skin – which stung for a second and then soothed, rapid and cool – before taking several healthy gulps of rather warm water.

 

“Who are you?” she asked, once she felt like she could speak, even though she thought she had an idea. She had seen that tilt of a head before, the shape of that mouth, those straight brows; and then he smiled without opening his mouth and bowed his head and she knew.

 

“Anakin,” he said. “My name’s Anakin. I’m your mother’s cousin.”

 

Rey digested this approach to an introduction, and tried very hard not to contrast it with what (say) her cousin Kylo might have expected to hear. She drank some more water, in order to cover herself.

 

“I’m trying to build a lightsaber,” Rey said, instead of saying any of the many other things that came to mind. “Nothing seems to be going right.”

 

“I know,” Anakin said.

 

“Can you help me?”

 

Anakin shrugged. “Maybe.”

 

Rey, who was still working on the patience thing, clawed back several sharp remarks. “Do you know how I find a crystal? That’s the bit I’m missing. I keep looking, and looking –”

 

Anakin was smiling. She stopped.

 

“That’s your problem,” Anakin said. “You keep _looking_. You need to just _see_. That was my mistake on Ilum – I was so cold and so desperate to get back somewhere with a functioning heater, I searched. I didn’t let myself be guided.”

 

“So what,” Rey said, trying to be receptive, “I just get up and walk?”

 

“It’s worth a try.”

 

Rey sighed, got to her feet, and picked up her pack. She hauled it onto her back and marched out into the canyon outside her alcove without looking – stupid, foolish, the kind of mistake that would have got her killed on Jakku, but she couldn’t feel a life-form that would offer her any threat, only… potential.

 

Rey nearly tripped over a rock. Potential?

 

She squashed her growing excitement and unfocussed her senses. Don’t look, she thought. Just see.

 

She started to walk, keeping her breathing meditative and her mind open. The trick, she thought – she hoped – was not to look too closely at anything. Like looking for a navigable path in an asteroid belt; she needed to follow deeper instincts.

 

About twenty minutes later, Rey tripped over the same rock and fell on her hands and knees, grazing them badly and barely avoiding plunging, headfirst, into a shaded corner where a crystal winked at her, just out of the dying light.

 

“Rey?” Anakin said.

 

“I’m fine, I just – augh _, shavit_.”

 

Rey rocked back onto her ankles, staring at the crystal tucked into the rock and wondering how to get it out of its niche. After a few dumbfounded moments, she realised the niche was the corner she’d been sitting in, meditating, for hours.

  
“You _absolute shithead_ ,” she said in disbelief.

 

Anakin Skywalker laughed and laughed. Presumably spirits couldn’t cry and didn’t need to hold themselves up, but he was doing a good job of pretending to lever himself against the rocky wall of the canyon, wheezing with laughter, wiping his eyes.

 

“ _E chu ta_ ,” Rey snapped, and kicked dust through his ghostliness.

 

“Hey, if it makes you feel any better,” Anakin said cheerfully, hiccupping a snort as he glanced at her infuriated face, “my padawan was in such a hurry to get out of Ilum she fell face first into the snow. And I got it on _holo_.”

 

Rey said nothing as she prised the crystal out of the rock, and did not let him ride the speeder back to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s hut.

 

 

After a relatively long shower and the application of analgesic, antiseptic and bandages to her knees – she needed dexterity in her hands – Rey ate dinner on the rocky ledge outside the hut, the crystal safely tucked into a zipped pocket. It felt warm where it rested against her thigh, and she didn’t think it was her body heat.

  
“If I materialise, will you throw the spoon at me?” asked Anakin’s disembodied voice.

 

“No,” Rey said, scraping up her rations and stuffing the aforementioned cutlery into her mouth. “Waste of a spoon,” she added, without taking it out of her mouth.

 

Anakin flickered slowly into view, over the empty void of the canyon in the night.

 

Rey pointed the spoon at him. “Do you do this to Luke?”

 

“Not for a long time,” Anakin said quietly. Rey got the impression that wasn’t a good thing.

 

“I guess hermits in the middle of nowhere aren’t good for making fun of.”

 

“I was too worried about him.”

 

Rey looked down at her bowl and stirred the food in it – what was it? She hadn’t checked the packet, but it tasted fine – in order to have something to do.

 

“It’s better,” Anakin said, “since you dragged him back from Ahch-To. Thank you for that.”

 

Rey shrugged one shoulder awkwardly. “You’re welcome,” she murmured.

 

There was a long silence. The vaporator whirred distantly, and an optimistic whooping lizard far below made several mating calls.

 

“I could blow my hands off, doing this,” Rey pointed out, eventually. “Luke gave me a list of the things that can go wrong when you make a lightsaber. It was four pages long!”

 

“One of Professor Huyang’s backups, probably,” Anakin said. “Meant for scaring twelve-year-olds. Don’t listen to Luke. He made his lightsaber in a hole in the rock and did absolutely everything you aren’t supposed to do. He still has – well.” Anakin rubbed the back of his neck. “He still has the same number of hands he started with.”

 

Against her will, Rey snorted. “So the manuals about levitating everything into place are wrong?”

 

“Not wrong,” Anakin said, “just inflexible. If you know the Force better than you know mechanics, they work. I assembled mine with the Force but it didn’t work quite right until I took it apart and put it back together by hand. Luke made his by hand because he didn’t know any other way of doing it, but it would still probably work better for him that way. You’re still using the Force – the fine judgement you need to know when to act, that’s drawing on the Force, it’s just not so flashy.”

  
Rey digested this.

 

“Try it when you’ve slept,” Anakin said. “You’re exhausted. You don’t have to do everything at once.”

 

“Your mother used to tell me that.”  
  
“She used to tell me, too, but I didn’t listen,” Anakin said. “And I told Ahsoka, but she didn’t listen either. I hope your padawans actually pay attention to you.”  
  
Rey’s lips curved into a smile. “Will you still be here, if I ask for help?”  
  
“If you ask, I’ll answer,” Anakin said, and the warmth in his voice settled right down to her bones. He was nothing at all like the desert woman – nothing like his mother – but for just a second, Rey could hear the same certainty in his voice.

 

“Thank you,” Rey said.

 

“Cousin,” Anakin answered, and kissed her forehead.

 

It stung, but Rey smiled.

 

 

She slept without dreams, and woke in the morning feeling better than she had for days. She spent some time doing katas as a moving meditation – all the time spent cramped in an alcove kept coming back to haunt her in tight muscles and bruising – and some time re-reading the manuals and instructions she’d been sent, and laying out her carefully gathered components on the table. Many of the things that made up a lightsaber were not, strictly speaking, difficult to find; it was the focussing crystal that was the problem, the piece that needed to be chosen most carefully for fear of blowing something up, and Rey now had that.

 

Rey sat back in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s rickety chair and eyed the arc of mechanical pieces laid out before her, the crystal at the centre where it felt like it belonged.

 

“Do you think I should do this outside?” she asked. “In case something explodes?”

 

“No,” Anakin said, and Rey twitched in her seat. Her former lightsaber was still in her knapsack from the previous day – normally it never left her side, but she had felt better setting it down over the last twenty-four hours – and Rey felt it pull against the stitching, ready to fly to her. Consciously, she let go, and in the background, the knapsack fell over.

 

“Because nothing’s going to explode,” Anakin said, as if nothing had happened.

 

Rey folded her arms. “I didn’t know you were already here.”  


“I think anything sensitive for a mile around can tell you’re gearing up to make your lightsaber,” Anakin answered. “I just thought I’d wait around until you asked.”

 

Rey twisted to look at him. He was standing over her shoulder, like he was really real, like he was supervising her work as if he were her teacher, not a long-dead cousin with a trail of bloodshed in his past.

 

Well, from a certain point of view…

 

Rey dropped that thought.

 

Anakin smiled down at her like he knew what she was thinking. He had the desert woman’s quiet smile, the same way General Organa did, the same way Luke did, when they were pleased with something but not loudly so.

 

“The easiest thing to do is just to start,” Anakin said. “Forget that it’s a lightsaber. Just think of it as something you need to put back together. And then start.”

 

“Right,” Rey said. She took a deep breath, and reached for the vortex ring and field conductor.

 

“Don’t worry about the table,” Anakin said, off-hand. “Obi-Wan won’t mind if you scorch it.”

 

 

Three hours, four failed attempts, and a number of small burns later, Rey broke for lunch. She ate it just inside the door, in the deep shade afforded by the hut’s thick walls, and read a letter from Kaydel, updating her on the latest peace talks and sending her a picture of Finn face down and snoring on his datapad, official robes crumpled. Jas had also sent a message, but theirs mostly consisted of rambling panic about the fact that Minna had now decided they were ready to lay aside their apprenticeship and become a Jedi Knight.

 

Rey tried to think of something soothing in response, which was difficult; in the end, she sent Jas an image of the scattered lightsaber components and scorched table, and wrote simply: _being a knight doesn’t mean you stop fucking up. You don’t have to be perfect._

 

Anakin was sitting opposite her, leaning against a wall with his eyes closed. He looked surprisingly peaceful; Rey considered commenting on it, and then decided against it. Anakin wasn’t as predictable as his mother, but they had at least this in common besides their smile: if Rey asked for the truth they would tell it.

 

 _The past is what you make of it, remember_. And Rey had no idea what to make of a Darth Vader who handed her pieces of lightsaber and waited patiently while she smeared bacta over her burned fingers and talked only about his son, not the daughter who had forbidden him to claim her. Total forgiveness, or ignoring the crimes he had committed over twenty years of bloodshed, was certainly not on the cards.

 

Poe had not managed to reach Finn since the last time they’d spoken, but he was on his way, still in hyperspace. He’d sent Rey and Finn a ten-minute vid of himself, filmed in hyperspace and meandering like a diary entry, familiar and warm and conversational, like he was right there. Rey watched it with headphones in, smiling at BB-8’s whistled interruptions, Poe’s curly hair in disorder from his helmet, the way he slouched in his seat.

 

Force, she missed him and Finn. She replied with a short note about the frustrations of lightsaber building, and tried not to count the days until she’d actually be able to see and touch them both.

 

“You miss them,” Anakin said, without opening his eyes.

 

“It’s rude to snoop,” Rey said, without looking up.

 

“I’m not snooping, you’re broadcasting,” Anakin said, and now he was looking at her and smiling again, that same quiet smile. “Your happiness colours the Force around you.”

 

Rey tried to think of something to say to this. All she came up with in the end was an answering smile.

 

She got up and left her datapad on her bed and her bowl in the sink, then drank some more water and sat down at her table. She stretched out her hands and flexed her fingers.

 

“Back to work,” she muttered, and took the half the casing in one hand and called the half-completed power assembly to her with the Force.

 

 

Anakin watched, calm, patient, and Rey took comfort from that. If anything did try to explode, he would probably stop it.

 

 

The last piece clicked into place with the fall of the setting sun, and Rey, hardly daring to breathe, lit it up in the lengthening shadows. A solid bar of burning green plasma, not skipping or fragmented or overheating under her hands, leapt into life, and Rey tried a careful pass or two with it. It hummed under her hands, and Rey felt a sense of rightness settle around her. She had blocked the faint singing of her old lightsaber out in order to concentrate on this work, but now she realised – distantly, as if it wasn’t important – that she couldn’t hear it at all.

 

“Job done,” Anakin said, and he sounded pleased, he sounded proud. “Nice work, Rey.”

 

“Thank you,” Rey said, and realised she was grinning, bright and exhausted. “Thank you for helping.”

 

“I only helped you help yourself,” Anakin answered, and now he reminded her of Luke.  “You did all the hard work.”

 

“Still,” Rey said. She got to her feet, stretched her legs, and glanced out into the gathering darkness. “Do you think it’s safe enough for me to try it out?”

  
“There’s nothing suicidal enough to try their luck on a knight who’s just made their first lightsaber,” Anakin said wryly. “Not even on Tatooine. Rey, look at yourself – you _blaze_ with the Force.”

 

Rey looked, and laughed, and looked away. She took her new lightsaber, and strode to the edge of the cliff: she marked her landing spot, called for the Force that came so easily to her hands, and leapt. She danced in the falling night with her saber and the shadows for a partner, let the energy run through her and rejoiced in it, and – because she was old enough and smart enough to know when her hamstrings were about to give out – turned her last whirling Ataru kata into a landing back on the ledge where she had started. Tiredness immediately washed through her at the sight of the still-open door and the dim light she’d left on to guide her, and she stumbled, extinguishing her lightsaber.

 

“Ow,” she muttered, catching herself on the edge of the door.

 

“Tired?” Anakin asked, amused.

 

Rey nodded.

 

“You’ll sleep half of tomorrow,” he warned her. “Assembling a first lightsaber and then running off to defeat a criminal mastermind is for idiots and Luke.”  


“I have no plans to defeat a criminal mastermind,” Rey said, sitting down and dragging off her boots. “Not right now, anyway.”

 

Anakin snorted. “Just let yourself sleep.”

 

His hand passed over her hair, and she felt the gesture like the breeze pushing it back off her forehead; she knew if she reached up her fingers would close on empty air, but she half-smiled anyway.

  
“I have two questions left,” she said. “Before you go.”

 

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Fire away.”

 

“First,” Rey said, “why doesn’t my old lightsaber work for me any more?”

 

Anakin raked his teeth over his lower lip and frowned, like he was really thinking about it. “I think it’s had it’s time, that’s all,” he replied in the end. “Some lightsabers – they’re of their moment. Lightsabers are so personal that they’re generally not handed down, but when they are, it doesn’t follow that they’ll work for each person the same way, or that they will always work for each person. You’ll find that you make and remake this one as you get older, as it needs it, whether or not you manage to hang onto the crystal. As for your old one - you’ve changed. The galaxy’s changed. The time it was made for is no longer here.”

 

He shrugged. “I don’t know for certain, but if I had to guess… The starving, lonely scavenger off Jakku isn’t the woman I see before me today. That lightsaber is a weapon for the lost. You found yourself some time ago.”

 

“I did ask.” Rey looked at the knapsack where her previous lightsaber still lay, out of sight, definitely not out of mind.

 

“What’s your second question?” Anakin said. He was smiling at her with something that might have been affection.

 

Rey looked back at him. “Did you do this for Kylo Ren? Did you help him, too?”  


The smile faded slowly from Anakin’s face, and the lines deepened somehow even as his expression remained the same.

 

“I tried,” Anakin said. “But he couldn’t hear me.”

 

Rey sat with this for a while, the weight of it, the grief of it, all the lost chances for change. She could see them weighing heavily on Anakin’s shoulders. She could imagine Kylo’s disbelief.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said at last.

 

Anakin jerked his head sharply, a kind of negation. “Don’t be,” he said, and added with a grim irony: “He turned out just like me, in the end.”  


“Don’t,” Rey said. “Don’t be cruel to yourself. Or to him.”

  
  
He looked at her for a long moment.

 

“You make a good Jedi,” he said, eventually. “A better one than me.”

 

Rey said nothing.

 

“Your uncle Luke sends his congratulations,” Anakin said, and smiled faintly. He clapped her shoulder, solidly, like she was his student who had just succeeded at something, or his soldier who had just laid out a plan. “Call for me if you need me, Rey. You know where to find me now.”

 

“Goodbye,” Rey said, softly. “Thank you.”

 

She blinked, and he was gone.

 

 

True to Anakin’s warning, Rey slept for nearly twelve hours, and woke in the heat of the day. She waited it out by lingering uncharacteristically over her lunch, and by sending a lot of people pictures of her newly built lightsaber. It was probably a horrible hour of the night wherever they were, but still messages trickled in in response: _good work_ from General Organa, _!!!_ and several moving pictures of dancing people from Finn, blueprints of a saberstaff – and Rey had only ever heard of those; they were more a myth than anything else – from Jas. _Just dug these up_ , the message read. _Maybe for your next one?_

 

Rey groaned at the thought of remaking a lightsaber, and just sent Jas a smiley face.

 

To Luke, she just sent: _Finished the job – I’m coming home_.

 

She packed up and took the speeder out as soon as the first heat was off the afternoon. She did not stop to thank Obi-Wan Kenobi out loud, but she poured water onto his threshold, and hoped he knew enough about Tatooine to count.

 

She stopped at the Lars homestead, and took out her old lightsaber.

 

_You’ve changed. The galaxy’s changed. The time it was made for is no longer here._

_The past is what you make of it, remember._

 

She raised her new lightsaber and tossed the old into the air: cut it in half on the downswing. It fell into two equal halves, sizzling, on the sand, and Rey buried it, under the sky Luke had been raised beneath, at the headstone where Anakin’s body didn’t lie, with her own scorched Skywalker hands.

 

Distantly, she could hear Anakin laughing like he was pleased.

 

Rey smiled.


End file.
